Claude Cowork, Anthropic's AI assistant for taking care of simple tasks on your computer, is now available for anyone with a $20 per month Pro subscription to try. Anthropic launched Cowork as an exclusive feature for its Max subscribers, who pay a minimum of $100 per month for more uses of Claude's expensive reasoning models and early access to experimental features. Now Claude Cowork is available at a cheaper price, though Anthropic notes "Pro users may hit their usage limits earlier" than Max users do.
Hold on. There's yet another method, one that comes from MacOS. That method is Homebrew. What is Homebrew? Homebrew is a free, open-source package manager for Linux and MacOS that simplifies the installation and management of software. Think of Homebrew as a command-line version of the App Store that allows you to install command-line tools such as Python, Node.js, and more with ease.
If the current speculation is correct, Apple's 2026 operating system releases will follow a familiar path: they're more likely to mimic the macOS Snow Leopard pattern set in 2009 than deliver a raft of snazzy new features. Snow Leopard, if you recall, was intended to be a refinement of all the new technologies introduced in the preceding Leopard version of macOS rather than something with a ton of new features.
Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to "File" or "Edit" or "View" and you'll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu). It's extra noise to me. It's not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below).
You're on your MacOS device, shopping for a holiday gift for your loved one. You find the perfect item and decide it has to be purchased. You go through the shopping cart process and decide to pay with PayPal. You click the pay button, and nothing happens. Nothing. You click the pay button again, and nothing happens. Again and again and again... with no results. What gives?
You might think that MacOS is unbreakable, but in that assumption, you would be wrong. Things happen, either by way of an upgrade gone awry or a misconfigured option in Settings. Also: Should you upgrade to M5 MacBook Pro from an M1? How the numbers add up Either way, when things go south, you'll be thankful that you set up automatic snapshots.
macOS 26 "Tahoe" is due in a few days, and there are a whole four Intel Macs that will be able to run it: the 2019 MacBook Pro and Mac Pro, and the 2020 MacBook Pro and iMac. Those are the official models, anyway. As we covered back in 2023, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project offers a free tool that lets you create a custom-modified macOS installer that will let you install newer versions of macOS onto Macs too old to officially support them.
The choice between Linux and MacOS isn't hard. If you can answer these questions, you'll know which to choose. Both are outstanding choices and will serve you well. I use both Linux and MacOS. The former is used for everyday tasks, and the latter for video editing and mobile usage (please, someone, create a Linux laptop that is as reliable and similar to a MacBook).
